Almost 2 Tons Of Cocaine Seized Off Puerto Rico

SAN JUAN (Reuters) - A 1.8 ton cocaine shipment worth an
estimated $50 million that was thought to be destined for the
U.S. market was seized off the coast of Puerto Rico, federal
authorities said on Wednesday, in one of the largest drug busts
there in recent years.

The shipment was intercepted on Monday evening on a 30-foot boat
that was 12.5 miles off the resort town of Dorado on Puerto
Rico's north coast.

"We have seized more than three tons of cocaine over the last
month," Angel Melendez, head of the U.S. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement's (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations office in
San Juan, said on Wednesday.

The great majority of cocaine destined for the U.S. market is
smuggled via Mexico, but U.S. officials have said that joint
U.S.-Mexican counter-drug efforts have begun to push some of the
traffic back into the Caribbean, an historically popular corridor
during the heyday of Colombia's Medellin cartel in the 1980s and
1990s.

About 14 percent of U.S.-bound cocaine shipments, roughly 42
tons, was trafficked through the Caribbean in the first six
months of 2013, and Puerto Rico and the neighboring Dominican
Republic have emerged as hubs of the burgeoning trade, according
to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

That was double the share of U.S.-bound cocaine that was shipped
through the region during the first half of 2012, Vito Guarino,
special agent in charge of the DEA's Caribbean division, said
last October.

The U.S. has seen a 30 percent overall drop in the amount of
cocaine smuggled into the United States over the same time
period, partly due to increased drug interdiction efforts along
the U.S.-Mexico border, Guarino said at that time.

Melendez told a news conference on Wednesday that a drug bust
netted 1.1 tons of cocaine on the south coast of Puerto Rico in
March. Drug traffickers use the Caribbean corridor as one of the
preferred routes to send drugs to the United States, he said.

Last December a 33-foot long boat was seized off Puerto Rico
containing 54 bales of cocaine weighing about 1,500 kilos.

Two suspected smugglers arrested on Monday were identified as
Reny Alexander López Meneces and Andri Rivas Rojas Irving, both
Venezuelan nationals. If convicted, they face from 10 years to
life in prison and are being held at the federal detention center
in San Juan on drug trafficking charges, authorities said.

ICE spokesman Ivan L. Ortiz-Delgado said the go-fast boat is
believed to have traveled directly from Venezuela to Puerto Rico.
He said smugglers use either this direct approach, or "island
hop" through small eastern Caribbean nations or attempt to
smuggle into the United States through the Dominican Republic.

The bust was made by the Caribbean Corridor Strike Force (CCSF),
an initiative of the U.S. Attorney's Office created to combat
major drug trafficking organizations operating in the Caribbean.

(Reporting by a Reuters correspondent in San Juan; Editing by
David Adams)